Paradise lost
A reflection on luck, loss and childhood in the wake of Hurricane Helene
February 26, 2025 | memoir by Delaney Starling
This story is from Atrium’s Winter 2024 magazine, which released December 2024.
St. Petersburg has been in the direct path of more hurricanes than I can count. I’ve watched, eyes glued to The Weather Channel, the path of certain destruction zero in on my home, then veer toward someone else’s.
I was lucky, and I knew it. The phrase “I live where you vacation” was the mantra of St. Pete’s youth. No matter how bad life got, I could hold on to my good fortune of growing up in a place with pristine beaches, the best fried grouper and an endless supply of cloudless days. But luck doesn’t last forever. On Sept. 25, I had all the luck in the world. That changed overnight.
The morning after Hurricane Helene tore through the Gulf of Mexico, my mom called to tell me impossible things.
“We got 4 feet of seawater in the house,” she said. “Everything on the first floor is destroyed.”
My childhood photos, waterlogged, drifted aimlessly around my bedroom, the little girl in the pictures unaware of the devastation facing her grown-up self.
I envied her.
My next thought was for my second home, a place steps from the Gulf that I frequented when luck was inexhaustible. We called the secluded, lush patch “The Garden.” Nearly every weekend after I turned 15, my friends and I would follow the footpath made by teenagers before us, soft sand squeaking with every step of our tanned feet, on a pilgrimage to the mecca of renegade experimentation. To tourists, this sacred space might have looked like little more than a cluster of tropical flora. But The Garden meant everything to us and thousands of other teens who called St. Pete home, shielding us from authority figures.
Walking through the archway formed by a low-hanging sea grape, we reached our refuge. The smell of Australian Gold tanning lotion and lingering traces of past joints made my blood move faster and colors seem brighter. We always sat in the same spot near the rocks that kept our teenage Eden from being swept away into the Gulf. We spent our days in The Garden doing whatever our parents forbade. The music could always be louder; we could always have one more drink. Basking under the afternoon sun, we were steeped in a feeling of naive immortality that I only noticed once it left. Our freckles could never become skin cancer. We would be friends forever.
The last time I went to The Garden was shortly before Helene, the storm that would bury it under two feet of sand and strip its sea grapes bare. I went alone just before sunset. I wanted to visit my memories. Looking across the water, waiting for the sky and ocean to become one in the last slivers of light, I had a distinct feeling our luck was about to run out. The sea would swallow us, and it would have every right.
